Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Facebook: All your geeky friends...

3. Most techies were not popular in high school: No, it is not fair, but this is true. But in a friending and poking frenzy, Silicon Valley’s denizens have embraced Facebook as only those who were picked last at dodgeball could.

I kid about the dodgeball part, but what is more serious is the warped view those in the tech sector have for Facebook, because it is the latest and shiniest thing and because their geek friends are all using it.

She's dissing Facebook as being just another geek playground. This is where she's got it totally wrong. First off, the world's geek population is much less than 30 million. Nope, all those people in Facebook aren't geeks.

From my own analysis the uber-geeks I know are all pretty much anti-facebook. They see it as a walled garden, they're getting all the functionality offered by Facebook from other places, but mostly they just don't find it that interesting. Nope Facebook is not being driven by geeks - it's decidedly anti-geek in its value system.

The question is how do you counter balance the network effect? I don't think you can. The geeks not liking Facebook is not enough to slow it down.